In an increasingly competitive world market, illegal copies and counterfeits of manufactured products are regularly offered for sale.
Accordingly, there are several anti-counterfeit technologies available, ranging from simple and visible, such as a bar-code, to complicated and “invisible”, e.g. DNA taggants. The purpose of all these markers or signatures is to enable authentication of an item, e.g. by government, the manufacturer, end users or customs.
Prior art anti-counterfeit signatures can be hard to apply to a product and/or expensive. Furthermore, the structure of the signatures has been difficult to control in a precise and simple manner. Furthermore, especially the invisible and sophisticated signatures such as sequences of DNA-molecules can be removed, damaged accidentally or added later, and analyzing them is time-consuming, difficult and/or requires very specialized equipment and/or a laboratory environment. Majority of prior art anti-counterfeit methods requires an individual signature for each product, when the code is to be varied.
It is the object of the current invention to ameliorate the disadvantages of the prior art anti-counterfeit signature schemes with a method and apparatus for providing by atomic layer deposition a coating structure forming an identifiable signature, marker or code that is difficult to duplicate on a surface of a product according to different aspects of invention as described hereinafter.